Those options still require that the programmer choose the parallelization points (and therefore synchronization points) explicitly. That is a far cry from what you claimed in the grandparent post:
See any functional language, eg Haskell or Erlang. Write a program in these languages, and the parallel-processing happens just about automatically.
par and pseq require you to designate parallelization points explicitly, which already means that the parallel processing doesn't happen automatically when I write a program. OTOH you don't have to have explicit synchronization points; but using the value of the "sparked" argument causes synchronization at some unpredictable point in time (because of laziness). That's a minor issue, though; the bigger deal is that if you choose your parallelization points unwisely, you can get bad performance (through excessive low-level synchronization) or insufficient throughput.
Data Parallel Haskell requires you to use special data structures, which also means that the parallelism also doesn't happen automatically. I either have to know beforehand where the use of DPC will actually be useful, or I'm going to have to modify an earlier program (possibly extensively) to make use of DPC.
I hadn't run into Parallel Strategies already. Thanks for pointing that one out. I need to have a look.
There are also languages with far superior parallel-processing abilities, where the effort is done by the compiler/environment, not the programmer. See any functional language, eg Haskell or Erlang. Write a program in these languages, and the parallel-processing happens just about automatically.
Have you ever actually programmed in either of these two languages? In neither does parallel processing happen automatically. They both simply happen to come with easier-to-use thread synchronization mechanisms. You still have to decide what are your program's threads and the details of how they communicate.
There are a lot of different types of scripts, and most don't have a relationship between the shape of a character and its sound:
Idiograms: the characters are stylized pictorial depictions of things. Some very early inscriptions were like this; e.g., very early hieroglyphics. It's arguable whether this is truly "writing."
Logograms: the characters represent words, not things. They don't look very much like drawings of the things they represent, and there are often rules that allow you to use a simpler character as a "base" for inventing a new one for a word that sounds similar. Chinese is like this.
Syllabary: the characters represent whole syllables. Japanese kana (not the kanji) are like this.
Abugida: the characters represent consonants, but take modifiers to represent the vowels that appear with them. A bunch of Indian scripts are like this.
Abjad: characters represent consonants, vowels not normally written down. Don't ask me how this works. The Arabic and Hebrew scripts are like this.
Alphabet: Each character represents a phoneme. The Latin alphabet is the most famous one.
Featural: Each character is a conventional representation of the phonetic details of it is pronounciation. The Korean script, the most famous example by far, is a featural alphabet written in syllabic blocks. Tolkien's Tengwar script in The Lord of the Rings is another famous one.
So out of those seven types, only featural scripts can be said to represent the pronunciation of the sounds--and this isn't as useful as you may think, because unless you know articulatory phonetics, you can't understand how featural scripts represent pronunciations.
The "players" in your story are the stocks. But the folks complaining about the rapid dissemination of analyses are the middlemen--in your gambling analogy, this would be the house, the folks who want to rig the game in their favor.
I think the court decision here is correct. If the house sells exclusive quick access to its analyses, it's only reasonable for them to demand that they buyers don't republish it too quickly; the information makes it out in end eventually anyway. The republishers are basically leeching off the brokers' analyses.
It's important to point out how little important this is in the grand scheme of things. Stock analyst reports are no better than random at predicting stock performance. Timing the stock market doesn't produce superior returns, nor does short-term trading. Paying for ultra-quick access to these reports in the expectation that they will help you time the market is not a good idea.
Basically, to continue your analogy, the house is selling their predictions about which card's gonna be drawn next. You can pay the normal fee, or you can pay extra if you want them to tell you sooner than they tell everybody else. If you pick the second option, however, the object if you go around and publish your early-access info.
That said, on its current path, the cost is unsustainable. And I agree that this legislation doesn't do enough to curb the costs.
Why do you think so? The legislation is hundreds of pages long because it contains lots of technical cost reduction measures, most of which I can't hope to understand easily.
And this legislation will save lives, if for nothing other than the removal of pre-existing condition clauses.
You're not seeing that removing pre-existing condition clauses and restricting rescission actually helps to align private insurers' interests with preventive care and medical cost reduction. Today, the business model for health insurers is to take money from premium holders, give them as little services as they can get away with, and kick out anybody who starts actually costing them money on any flimsy excuse they can find. By forcing them to, you know, actually pay for the health care of people who get sick, then there's a better chance that they will concentrate on preventing that from happening, taking care of the ones that do happen in a cost-effective manner, and so on.
Insurance is supposed to be a hedge against catastrophe. You know, brain cancer. The kind of thing where the expense is so astronomical, that it would ruin you. Instead, we have insurers covering viagra (only actually necessary in very rare cases-- I have a friend with a rare pulmonary disorder, and strangely enough, viagra is an effective treatment for her) and elective surgery, because people don't want to pay for them themselves.
I wish people would stop spreading this meme that "insurance is supposed to be a hedge against catastrophe." No, insurance is simply risk transfer; some kinds of insurance protect only against catastrophic risk, but other kinds protect against much milder risk.
I'm not going to pick apart your two examples (viagra and "elective surgery"); however, I will point out that much of the care that people who make your argument claim is not "catastrophic" and should not be insured, overall, reduces the risk and cost of catastrophic care. The insurer can afford to spend $1,000 per person on some relatively minor non-catastrophic care if this prevents 2% of them from requiring later catastrophic care that would cost them $50,000 bill later on.
One of the usual analogies here is to compare health insurance to a hypothetical and absurd auto insurance policy that paid for your gas. However, the thing is that while a health insurer that pays you for routine care decreases your chances you'll need catastrophic care, an auto insurer that paid for your gas would encourage you to drive more, which would increase your chance of having an accident, and therefore, the insurer's costs.
You don't understand what would happen...
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Health Care Reform
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Insurance sales across state lines (surely a real interstate commerce item)
As far as this one point is concerned, I can tell you why this is unlikely to ever happen. The individual state laws regarding insurance companies and what they have to cover/can't cover/etc varies wildly from state to state, even between neighboring states. It would be nigh impossible to do this.
Say you live in Maryland, and want to buy Insurance A from New Jersey. Say Maryland has a law stating insurance companies have to cover a specific condition, but they DON'T have that law in New Jersey. You will have bought insurance that isn't guaranteed to cover you the way it should because the laws are different in the two states...this is why companies have different "arms" in every state, because every state has vastly different laws.
It actually wouldn't be like what you describe, because all of the insurance companies would set up shop exclusively in the states with the least regulation. So in your example, you'd only have the choice to buy your policy from New Jersey. And remember that most people don't actually choose their insurer--their employer chooses it for them.
The whole "buy insurance across state lines" is a health insurer proposal to crassly deregulate the market in their favor, turned into a Republican talking point by a flimsy claim that it would lower costs. (Which it easily would, by reducing the insurers' operating costs while further enabling them to not pay your claims.)
Well, yes, but it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Those represent relatively fixed cost to the ISP (again, not really, but close enough for this discussion).
No, you're failing to see an important distinction. The network infrastructure is a fixed cost, but the cost of using the network is not the cost of the network infrastructure; it is the price that the market would pay for transit on that network. Every time Google transmits their own data over their fiber network, they had the alternative of selling that bandwidth to somebody else as transit. The price that they could have obtained from that sale is the cost of that bandwidth.
The point is that when analyzing the cost of their network, you should really think about what the value of the bandwidth of the network is, and compare it to the revenue that they obtain from using the network. If the revenue over the long term turns out to be less than the market value of the bandwidth, then they're better off selling the bandwidth.
It's more like you own a truck, and you are driving accost town anyway, so your friend asks you to pick up a box and deliver it. Sure you had to burn a little more gas, and it took about fifteen minutes more, but it's your friend, and compared to what you were doing to start with it's not a big deal, aka 'free'.
Except that given how much traffic YouTube requires, it's more like you're driving across town to do your weekly groceries for your family of four, but you need to do it in a trailer truck because you're also hauling along your friend's containerful of weightlifting gear for his fitness equipment store, which by the way, is not turning any profit.
You wouldn't need the trailer and most of the gas if you were just doing your groceries; an SUV would do the job just fine. (And yes, that last bit was saracsm.)
More accurately, this is like saying "I don't own a car, so my petrol costs are zero", and everyone in the comments going "But that doesn't include your bus tickets or the time you spend walking!", and completely missing the point.
You're stripping out the context. Some months ago, an analyst contended that YouTube's not making Google any money, because of the cost of buying bandwidth from external provider. The story mentions this, and then claims that YouTube's may be paying $0 to external providers for bandwidth, because of Google's fiber network and peering. In this context, it is perfectly reasonable to ask what are the operating costs of Google's fiber network, because the underlying question is whether Google breaks even on YouTube.
So, to fix your analogy, this is as if somebody bragging that they are thrifty because they don't own a car, and thus pay no money in gasoline, and then somebody else pointing out that the braggart spent a comparable amount of money on taxi fares.
No, but they're significantly fungible; if you pay enough for infrastructure costs, then you can use it to reduce your third party bandwidth bill, either by simply routing traffic through your own network, or by trading your bandwidth for theirs. Which is why the "zero bandwidth bill" claim is disingenuous if true.
It points out the folly when people say "Comcast/AT&T/Verizon/whomever has to pay huge upstream bandwidth costs, bandwidth isn't free y'know!", and it always gets marked as insightful. These guys are so large, bandwidth, other than physical maintenance of their physical plant, isn't a big part of their expenses.
The problem with this argument is that these guys' physical maintenance bills are significantly higher than most everybody else's. We may quibble whether this counts as an upstream bandwidth cost; it's upstream from the customer, but not from the ISP. But even in the second case, strictly speaking, peering is basically buying some of somebody else's bandwidth and paying not with money, but with some of your own bandwidth. But you still have the costs incurrent in delivering that "payment."
For complex data structures, one free for every malloc can indeed get very tricky to handle. For example, in C++, one can just write a destructor for a tree node that calls delete on it's children before delete'ing itself. Free'ing all memory is as simple as calling delete on the root node.
But what if you want to deallocate the parent node and all of its children except for one? E.g., you may have a situation where you can prove that your program will "go down" one particular branch of a very large tree and never need any of the rest. In this case, your proposal requires the program to hang on to the whole tree for the whole computation, when it only needs successively smaller subtrees.
Writing a recursive deallocator in C is trickier to get correct.
Why would it be any trickier? Writing a dealloc_tree function is trivial: the function first calls itself on the child nodes, then frees the parent node's memory. The big question marks are whether to free the data element pointed by each node (the data ownership problem), and how to free them. The first should be as much as a question mark in C as in C++. The second can be saved by using function pointers to pass in a custom function to free the node element.
Please elaborate on how an RBDMS is applicable to what I guess is now called "scaling horizontally", or perhaps more formally known as sharding, or partitioning with redundancy. It's my impression that most of the RBDMS products available today are simply atrocious at this, but if you can point out which books I need to look at, and which products have good support for this sort of scale, I'd love to learn.
So ignorance about database technologies and products is one issue, and the one hardest to excuse. There are however other issues that are more understandable:
Existing solutions for achieving horizontally scalable RDBMSs tend to use special hardware. For example, Teradata uses a proprietary interconnect between nodes. Small web startup definitely are not going to be able to afford this, and even the large ones would rather use commodity hardware, and have it geographically dispersed.
The products are designed for and marketed toward large, established enterprises, who already have a large volume of data, and are already willing to throw a lot of money on hardware, software licenses and support so they can analyze that data. Web startups, in contrast, want to start small.
The existing solutions are proprietary, and web startups tend to prefer open source solutions.
The existing solutions are biased toward OLAP, analytics and data mining, i.e., taking large volumes of data and analyzing large sets of it at a time. Some of the "NoSQL" products are built for this (e.g., Hadoop + HDFS), but there are others that are more aimed toward simple transactional processing.
So it really is the case that there do not exist good relational products that tackle something like Digg, Facebook or Twitter, which want to use commodity hardware in geographically dispersed locations. However, it is also the case that the "NoSQL movement" that has sprung up to fill this gap has a combination of ignorance and animosity towards the relational model, and are just not thinking the problem through.
There's one thing I noticed in the health care debate, none of the Democrats proposed voters get the same health care as congress gets.
There's a good number of Democrats in Congress that are in favor of a single-payer system that would give everybody the same health care. It's just that there aren't enough of them to get it passed.
Though this reminds me of a particularly evil fact: some health insurers have been known to tag famous or important people (celebrities, congressmen, etc.) as VIPs in their records systems, and to instruct their personnel to be considerably more lenient when handling their claims. Apparently the health insurers don't want the publicity or political consequences of denying a celebrity or congressperson's claim...
Gun safeties aren't designed to keep children away
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Accidental Wii Suicide
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· Score: 1
And a 3 year-old would understand this?
A 3 year-old fumbling with a gun might switch the safety off, for all you know.
Gun safety involves multiple redundant measures: always treat gun as if it's loaded, always verify whether the gun is loaded, don't switch safety off unless you're shooting, don't put finger on trigger unless you're shooting, don't point the gun at people unless you're killing. You shouldn't be relying on a gun's switch-operated safety mechanism to keep a bullet from shooting at a child in the first place, which is why it's just not very relevant at that point whether the gun had a safety. If the child at first fails to shoot the gun because of the safety, well, they may very well "succeed" after playing with it for a couple more minutes.
Also, the kind of safety mechanisms that a gun has is very dependent on its design, and some guns really need more failsafes that others do. A single-action semi-automatic pistol like a Colt 1911 very much needs have a switch safety, because it was designed to be carried cocked and with a round in the chamber, and it has a very light trigger action (3-5 pounds); there's a grip safety and a thumb switch safety because it's otherwise very easy to shoot the gun by accident, and the person most likely to get shot is the guy holding it. A double-action revolver, on the other hand, is carried uncocked and has a 12-pound trigger pull. Double-action semiautos are carried with a round on the chamber but uncocked; the first trigger pull is very heavy and subsequent ones are light, so a common safety mechanism is a switch to safely decock the gun after it's been shot, leaving it in its initial heavy-trigger state.
The way the criminal justice system works is that conviction on a charge is purely about the material facts of the case, whereas sentencing on a conviction is about just punishment. So the stepfather's remorse or lack thereof just isn't relevant to whether he should be charged and convicted of some crime. Only after he has convicted is that his remorse becomes relevant in determining the just sentence for his crime.
What I want to know is why the safety wasn't set on the gun.
There are many rules of gun safety, or rather, many ways of stating the same general principles. A good one is to assume the safety's gonna fail some unknown day, and treat the gun accordingly.
Gun safety involves a lot of redundant measures. If somebody hands you an unloaded gun, you check for yourself to make sure that it really is unloaded. You keep the safety on if you're not shooting it, even if you've already checked the gun's not loaded. You don't point the gun at anybody you're not gonna shoot, even if you've checked it's unloaded and you have the safety on. You don't put your finger in the trigger unless you're gonna shoot right then, even if you've checked that the gun's unloaded and the safety's on. And so on.
So you really shouldn't be asking why the safety wasn't set, because it doesn't matter. You should be asking what happened with all of the other safety precautions that should have prevented this.
The "don't charge him, he's suffered enough" crowd seem to not be aware that there's a reason why we have a separate sentencing process after conviction. We charge and convict people for crimes on purely material grounds, and then sentence on moral grounds.
Just looking on a word basis, we have more words with Germanic roots then French/Latin ones.
And as I said, this is irrelevant, one way or the other. The comparative method works by finding systematic sound correspondences between a core vocabulary of words that come from the proto-language. Loanwords later than the protolanguage must be discarded from the comparison sets, because you want to find systematic correspondences that cannot be explained in terms of chance or borrowing.
But grammatically, it's a bit of a wash. We lack German's complex case system, it's weird definite article system(30 definite articles!), and the whole agglutinative word thing.
...and again, yes, English and German are significantly different, but their present-day differences are just not relevant, because they are the result of changes that happened after the proto-language diverged. The goal of the comparison, again, is to find systematic correspondences that cannot be explained in terms of chance or borrowing. Even though the present-day languages have changed substantially, you're looking for traces of the fact that they have the same origin.
Also, your "agglutinative word" claim is very much off-base, for two reasons:
You're getting hung up on the fact that German orthography doesn't use spaces between the parts of the compounds, whereas English ortography normally does. But really, the grammar of an English expression like "systems integration engineering process" is the same whether you write it with spaces between the parts or not ("Systemsintegrationengineeringprocess").
The grammar for noun-noun and adjective-noun compounds in English and German is actually very similar--and at any rate, more similar to each other than either is to Romance languages like French or Spanish, where noun-noun compounds are very rare (the normal way to say that in Spanish would be something like "proceso de ingeniería de integramiento de sistemas," with prepositional phrases).
In any case, neither German nor English is actually showing agglutination. Agglutination is a term that's used to refer to certain forms of inflectional morphology, whereas compounding (along with derivation) is a type of what linguists call word-formation.
With French, the only real difference with English is the masculine/feminine and vous/tu distinction, both of which also exist in German.
Irrelevant, once more. English and German both descend from Proto-Germanic, a language that underwent the sound changes described by Grimm's law. French did not.
It is also very important to note that English actually used to have the same sort T/V distinction that French and German do, with thou vs. you. Again, the fact that English does not have that distinction today doesn't prove anything about its relationship to either French or German--and in this case because it's a that's true today but was not true even 500 years ago, much less 2000 years ago.
Not to mention that there are countless other grammatical differences between French and English that you're discounting. I already gave one example--English has extensive noun-noun compounding, whereas French doesn't.
But that's just a hunch, I don't know how I could quantify that sort of thing (I'd love to hear your input).
Indo-European historical linguistics was mostly figured out by 1930. I don't really have anything to say that you can't find in the ample, 200 years old literature about the historical linguistics of Indo-European languages.
I'll say one more things: linguistics is a very subtle topic, and it takes many years to really learn it. You
Also, a scary number of English idioms exist verbatum in French too. [...] This is because a) Our language is descended from theirs, and b) We tirelessly work to steal phrases from each other.
English is not "descended from French," period. It has a large proportion of vocabulary from French. To you that may sound like it makes it "descended from French," but as it turns out, that's simply irrelevant to language classification, and precisely for the reason you state as (b): languages borrow from others very easily.
English has a relatively recent common ancestor with German, called Proto-Germanic, and a much more distant one with French, called Proto-Indo-European. To show the link to German, however, you must compare English and German words that come from Proto-Germanic. English words that come from French are noise in this comparison.
In addition, the fact that idioms are shared between English and French isn't particularly because English speakers borrowed the idioms from French. It's more because English and French are both European languages whose speakers have a long history of cultural exchange, a history that actually goes further back than the languages themselves. There are a lot of idioms that are common to both languages because they both got them from a third source. The big common sources are the Greco-Roman classics, the Bible, Christianity. Also, every major work of prose from most West European countries since the Renaissance has been translated to the languages of the others and read extensively, so that yes, "I think, therefore I am" is as much of a stock phrase as "être ou ne pas être, telle est la question" is one in French.
Why can't software translate as easily as a human? Is it really that difficult to come up with a set of rules so things are worded correctly?
But translation isn't easy for humans, so there's no reason to expect it should be easy for computers.
Translating from one language to another, for a human translator, basically comes down to this:
Reading the source text and understanding it as deeply as possible.
Writing an "equivalent" text in the target language.
But the problem is that there is never unique "equivalent" text in the target language, but rather, a lot of alternatives that make different tradeoffs. This is because a foreign language is part of a foreign culture that has many concepts that are foreign to the source language, and likewise, the source language is part of a source culture that is foreign to the target language. So translators repeatedly find themselves in situations where either they must leave out something that the source text says or implies, or else say something unnatural in the target language to convey that information.
Comparing the grammar of dramatically different languages makes this really clear. For example, many languages have grammatical evidentiality, where statements are subject to grammatical rules that depend on the source of the speaker's information for the statement. So for example, a language where the equivalent to the sentence "Joe kicked Tom" required the verb to be conjugated differently depending on whether the speaker saw Joe kick Tom or heard so. If you had to translate an English text to a language like that, you'd have to decide, for each clause in the English text, who is the speaker of the sentence, and whether they know the event first-hand or second-hand, and either of those may often be unclear from the English text.
In the converse case, imagine if we're translating from a language like that into English. Then every sentence in the source language encodes some claim about how the speaker knows the information conveyed in that sentence. A completely literal translation, in which every English sentence had that information, would be extremely unnatural English writing. Leaving it out of every single sentence, on the other hand, might leave out something important to understand the text in some cases. So the translator has to decide in which cases the evidential conjugations of the source language must be translated into a longer English sentence than otherwise necessary.
This is one extreme example, but this sort of problem occurs at every level in translation. Translators often find themselves adding in information that the source text doesn't say, having to use circumlocutions in the target language to express really simple things from the source language, leaving out information from the source text has because it would be too cumbersome to phrase it in the target language, adopting strange conventions in the target language, or having to write supplementary materials to help the readers understand the translation (footnotes, introductions).
Or in a few cases, the translators write for people who don't know the source language but are familiar with some of the customs and concepts, or willing to learn them to understand the translation, and then they just leave untranslated words in. (Examples: lots of philosophy translations from German or French; anime fansubs that leave Japanese honorifics like -san or -sempai in, because the people who use them are anime fans, are at least a bit familiar with them, and actually understand more nuances that way.)
So, translation is not a mechanical task, and thus, there can't be a simple set of rules to do it. It's, as I said at the top, understanding a text in the source language, and writing another in the target language, tailored toward a different audience. And it requires understanding the audiences of the original text and the translation, and making many informal decisions based on that.
That is so moronic as to be laughable. You cannot donate $1 and get back more than $1. So, I doubt you really deal with the financial dealings of "tens of thousands of wealthy individuals".
By donating $1 to a charity that agrees to use it the way you would like to use it yourself, you have basically spent that dollar on what you want, tax-free. This is the power of the tax deduction for charitable donations--you get to divert money that would otherwise have gone to the government into your favorite charity, which can then spend it tax-free.
If you're rich enough, you can create your own charity organization and have it advance your own agenda. The problem is that your agenda may not be good...
Well, what I don't see is the direct relation to causality. They show there's a strong connection between violent video games and violence. But a connection doesn't imply causation.
The excellent link in hardburn's post above has a great answer to this whole "correlation is not causation" response that people like you always trot out when confronted with a study with conclusions you don't like:
The overly simplistic mantra, "Correlation is not causation," is useful when teaching introductory students the risks in too-readily drawing causal conclusions from a simple empirical correlation between two measured variables. However, correlational studies are routinely used in modern science to test theories that are inherently causal. Whole scientific fields are based on correlational data (e.g., astronomy). Well conducted correlational studies provide opportunities for theory falsification. They allow examination of serious acts of aggression that would be unethical to study in experimental contexts. They allow for statistical controls of plausible alternative explanations. [my emphasis]
Yes, as I highlighted, there are whole scientific fields whose data is based on nothing but correlations.
Good science starts with a clean slate (Ok, we know violence is an affect, let's study violent and non-violent groups and try to see the common factors and differences) and look for an outcome. Bad science starts with an outcome and looks to justify it based off of observation (That's not applicable to instances of verifying predicted outcomes based on an otherwise complete model)...
If that is true, then the theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun must be bad science, because this is exactly how modern heliocentrism got started. Galileo's heliocentric model had no predictive advantage over the geocentric models of his day. It took about 100 years for evidence that supported Galileo over his adversaries to appear.
At any rate, the idea that "good science starts with a clean slate" just doesn't survive when confronted with the history of science. Take, for example, Thomas Kuhn's famous notion of normal science from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Normal science is a period in the history of a science where there exists a paradigm. It is fair to say that during normal science, what scientists do is to take the existing paradigm and try to show, over and over again, that the paradigm explains everything. In your terms, they start with the outcome (e.g., planets orbit around the Sun) and try justify it with observations.
So basically, the most important book about the history of science in the second half of the 20th century contradicts your claims about "good" vs. "bad" science.
Slashdot Mirror
Those options still require that the programmer choose the parallelization points (and therefore synchronization points) explicitly. That is a far cry from what you claimed in the grandparent post:
par and pseq require you to designate parallelization points explicitly, which already means that the parallel processing doesn't happen automatically when I write a program. OTOH you don't have to have explicit synchronization points; but using the value of the "sparked" argument causes synchronization at some unpredictable point in time (because of laziness). That's a minor issue, though; the bigger deal is that if you choose your parallelization points unwisely, you can get bad performance (through excessive low-level synchronization) or insufficient throughput.
Data Parallel Haskell requires you to use special data structures, which also means that the parallelism also doesn't happen automatically. I either have to know beforehand where the use of DPC will actually be useful, or I'm going to have to modify an earlier program (possibly extensively) to make use of DPC.
I hadn't run into Parallel Strategies already. Thanks for pointing that one out. I need to have a look.
Have you ever actually programmed in either of these two languages? In neither does parallel processing happen automatically. They both simply happen to come with easier-to-use thread synchronization mechanisms. You still have to decide what are your program's threads and the details of how they communicate.
There are a lot of different types of scripts, and most don't have a relationship between the shape of a character and its sound:
So out of those seven types, only featural scripts can be said to represent the pronunciation of the sounds--and this isn't as useful as you may think, because unless you know articulatory phonetics, you can't understand how featural scripts represent pronunciations.
The "players" in your story are the stocks. But the folks complaining about the rapid dissemination of analyses are the middlemen--in your gambling analogy, this would be the house, the folks who want to rig the game in their favor.
I think the court decision here is correct. If the house sells exclusive quick access to its analyses, it's only reasonable for them to demand that they buyers don't republish it too quickly; the information makes it out in end eventually anyway. The republishers are basically leeching off the brokers' analyses.
It's important to point out how little important this is in the grand scheme of things. Stock analyst reports are no better than random at predicting stock performance. Timing the stock market doesn't produce superior returns, nor does short-term trading. Paying for ultra-quick access to these reports in the expectation that they will help you time the market is not a good idea.
Basically, to continue your analogy, the house is selling their predictions about which card's gonna be drawn next. You can pay the normal fee, or you can pay extra if you want them to tell you sooner than they tell everybody else. If you pick the second option, however, the object if you go around and publish your early-access info.
Why do you think so? The legislation is hundreds of pages long because it contains lots of technical cost reduction measures, most of which I can't hope to understand easily.
You're not seeing that removing pre-existing condition clauses and restricting rescission actually helps to align private insurers' interests with preventive care and medical cost reduction. Today, the business model for health insurers is to take money from premium holders, give them as little services as they can get away with, and kick out anybody who starts actually costing them money on any flimsy excuse they can find. By forcing them to, you know, actually pay for the health care of people who get sick, then there's a better chance that they will concentrate on preventing that from happening, taking care of the ones that do happen in a cost-effective manner, and so on.
I wish people would stop spreading this meme that "insurance is supposed to be a hedge against catastrophe." No, insurance is simply risk transfer; some kinds of insurance protect only against catastrophic risk, but other kinds protect against much milder risk.
I'm not going to pick apart your two examples (viagra and "elective surgery"); however, I will point out that much of the care that people who make your argument claim is not "catastrophic" and should not be insured, overall, reduces the risk and cost of catastrophic care. The insurer can afford to spend $1,000 per person on some relatively minor non-catastrophic care if this prevents 2% of them from requiring later catastrophic care that would cost them $50,000 bill later on.
One of the usual analogies here is to compare health insurance to a hypothetical and absurd auto insurance policy that paid for your gas. However, the thing is that while a health insurer that pays you for routine care decreases your chances you'll need catastrophic care, an auto insurer that paid for your gas would encourage you to drive more, which would increase your chance of having an accident, and therefore, the insurer's costs.
It actually wouldn't be like what you describe, because all of the insurance companies would set up shop exclusively in the states with the least regulation. So in your example, you'd only have the choice to buy your policy from New Jersey. And remember that most people don't actually choose their insurer--their employer chooses it for them.
The whole "buy insurance across state lines" is a health insurer proposal to crassly deregulate the market in their favor, turned into a Republican talking point by a flimsy claim that it would lower costs. (Which it easily would, by reducing the insurers' operating costs while further enabling them to not pay your claims.)
No, you're failing to see an important distinction. The network infrastructure is a fixed cost, but the cost of using the network is not the cost of the network infrastructure; it is the price that the market would pay for transit on that network. Every time Google transmits their own data over their fiber network, they had the alternative of selling that bandwidth to somebody else as transit. The price that they could have obtained from that sale is the cost of that bandwidth.
The point is that when analyzing the cost of their network, you should really think about what the value of the bandwidth of the network is, and compare it to the revenue that they obtain from using the network. If the revenue over the long term turns out to be less than the market value of the bandwidth, then they're better off selling the bandwidth.
Except that given how much traffic YouTube requires, it's more like you're driving across town to do your weekly groceries for your family of four, but you need to do it in a trailer truck because you're also hauling along your friend's containerful of weightlifting gear for his fitness equipment store, which by the way, is not turning any profit.
You wouldn't need the trailer and most of the gas if you were just doing your groceries; an SUV would do the job just fine. (And yes, that last bit was saracsm.)
You're stripping out the context. Some months ago, an analyst contended that YouTube's not making Google any money, because of the cost of buying bandwidth from external provider. The story mentions this, and then claims that YouTube's may be paying $0 to external providers for bandwidth, because of Google's fiber network and peering. In this context, it is perfectly reasonable to ask what are the operating costs of Google's fiber network, because the underlying question is whether Google breaks even on YouTube.
So, to fix your analogy, this is as if somebody bragging that they are thrifty because they don't own a car, and thus pay no money in gasoline, and then somebody else pointing out that the braggart spent a comparable amount of money on taxi fares.
No, but they're significantly fungible; if you pay enough for infrastructure costs, then you can use it to reduce your third party bandwidth bill, either by simply routing traffic through your own network, or by trading your bandwidth for theirs. Which is why the "zero bandwidth bill" claim is disingenuous if true.
The problem with this argument is that these guys' physical maintenance bills are significantly higher than most everybody else's. We may quibble whether this counts as an upstream bandwidth cost; it's upstream from the customer, but not from the ISP. But even in the second case, strictly speaking, peering is basically buying some of somebody else's bandwidth and paying not with money, but with some of your own bandwidth. But you still have the costs incurrent in delivering that "payment."
But what if you want to deallocate the parent node and all of its children except for one? E.g., you may have a situation where you can prove that your program will "go down" one particular branch of a very large tree and never need any of the rest. In this case, your proposal requires the program to hang on to the whole tree for the whole computation, when it only needs successively smaller subtrees.
Why would it be any trickier? Writing a dealloc_tree function is trivial: the function first calls itself on the child nodes, then frees the parent node's memory. The big question marks are whether to free the data element pointed by each node (the data ownership problem), and how to free them. The first should be as much as a question mark in C as in C++. The second can be saved by using function pointers to pass in a custom function to free the node element.
This only confirms my suspicion that the software industry is full of retards, and they all program in C.
The term shared-nothing architecture dates back to 1986. The concept goes back further; for example, the Teradata RDBMS dates back to 1976-1983.
So ignorance about database technologies and products is one issue, and the one hardest to excuse. There are however other issues that are more understandable:
The existing solutions are proprietary, and web startups tend to prefer open source solutions.
The existing solutions are biased toward OLAP, analytics and data mining, i.e., taking large volumes of data and analyzing large sets of it at a time. Some of the "NoSQL" products are built for this (e.g., Hadoop + HDFS), but there are others that are more aimed toward simple transactional processing.
So it really is the case that there do not exist good relational products that tackle something like Digg, Facebook or Twitter, which want to use commodity hardware in geographically dispersed locations. However, it is also the case that the "NoSQL movement" that has sprung up to fill this gap has a combination of ignorance and animosity towards the relational model, and are just not thinking the problem through.
There's a good number of Democrats in Congress that are in favor of a single-payer system that would give everybody the same health care. It's just that there aren't enough of them to get it passed.
Though this reminds me of a particularly evil fact: some health insurers have been known to tag famous or important people (celebrities, congressmen, etc.) as VIPs in their records systems, and to instruct their personnel to be considerably more lenient when handling their claims. Apparently the health insurers don't want the publicity or political consequences of denying a celebrity or congressperson's claim...
A 3 year-old fumbling with a gun might switch the safety off, for all you know.
Gun safety involves multiple redundant measures: always treat gun as if it's loaded, always verify whether the gun is loaded, don't switch safety off unless you're shooting, don't put finger on trigger unless you're shooting, don't point the gun at people unless you're killing. You shouldn't be relying on a gun's switch-operated safety mechanism to keep a bullet from shooting at a child in the first place, which is why it's just not very relevant at that point whether the gun had a safety. If the child at first fails to shoot the gun because of the safety, well, they may very well "succeed" after playing with it for a couple more minutes.
Also, the kind of safety mechanisms that a gun has is very dependent on its design, and some guns really need more failsafes that others do. A single-action semi-automatic pistol like a Colt 1911 very much needs have a switch safety, because it was designed to be carried cocked and with a round in the chamber, and it has a very light trigger action (3-5 pounds); there's a grip safety and a thumb switch safety because it's otherwise very easy to shoot the gun by accident, and the person most likely to get shot is the guy holding it. A double-action revolver, on the other hand, is carried uncocked and has a 12-pound trigger pull. Double-action semiautos are carried with a round on the chamber but uncocked; the first trigger pull is very heavy and subsequent ones are light, so a common safety mechanism is a switch to safely decock the gun after it's been shot, leaving it in its initial heavy-trigger state.
The way the criminal justice system works is that conviction on a charge is purely about the material facts of the case, whereas sentencing on a conviction is about just punishment. So the stepfather's remorse or lack thereof just isn't relevant to whether he should be charged and convicted of some crime. Only after he has convicted is that his remorse becomes relevant in determining the just sentence for his crime.
There are many rules of gun safety, or rather, many ways of stating the same general principles. A good one is to assume the safety's gonna fail some unknown day, and treat the gun accordingly.
Gun safety involves a lot of redundant measures. If somebody hands you an unloaded gun, you check for yourself to make sure that it really is unloaded. You keep the safety on if you're not shooting it, even if you've already checked the gun's not loaded. You don't point the gun at anybody you're not gonna shoot, even if you've checked it's unloaded and you have the safety on. You don't put your finger in the trigger unless you're gonna shoot right then, even if you've checked that the gun's unloaded and the safety's on. And so on.
So you really shouldn't be asking why the safety wasn't set, because it doesn't matter. You should be asking what happened with all of the other safety precautions that should have prevented this.
The "don't charge him, he's suffered enough" crowd seem to not be aware that there's a reason why we have a separate sentencing process after conviction. We charge and convict people for crimes on purely material grounds, and then sentence on moral grounds.
And as I said, this is irrelevant, one way or the other. The comparative method works by finding systematic sound correspondences between a core vocabulary of words that come from the proto-language. Loanwords later than the protolanguage must be discarded from the comparison sets, because you want to find systematic correspondences that cannot be explained in terms of chance or borrowing.
...and again, yes, English and German are significantly different, but their present-day differences are just not relevant, because they are the result of changes that happened after the proto-language diverged. The goal of the comparison, again, is to find systematic correspondences that cannot be explained in terms of chance or borrowing. Even though the present-day languages have changed substantially, you're looking for traces of the fact that they have the same origin.
Also, your "agglutinative word" claim is very much off-base, for two reasons:
Irrelevant, once more. English and German both descend from Proto-Germanic, a language that underwent the sound changes described by Grimm's law. French did not.
It is also very important to note that English actually used to have the same sort T/V distinction that French and German do, with thou vs. you. Again, the fact that English does not have that distinction today doesn't prove anything about its relationship to either French or German--and in this case because it's a that's true today but was not true even 500 years ago, much less 2000 years ago.
Not to mention that there are countless other grammatical differences between French and English that you're discounting. I already gave one example--English has extensive noun-noun compounding, whereas French doesn't.
Indo-European historical linguistics was mostly figured out by 1930. I don't really have anything to say that you can't find in the ample, 200 years old literature about the historical linguistics of Indo-European languages.
I'll say one more things: linguistics is a very subtle topic, and it takes many years to really learn it. You
English is not "descended from French," period. It has a large proportion of vocabulary from French. To you that may sound like it makes it "descended from French," but as it turns out, that's simply irrelevant to language classification, and precisely for the reason you state as (b): languages borrow from others very easily.
English has a relatively recent common ancestor with German, called Proto-Germanic, and a much more distant one with French, called Proto-Indo-European. To show the link to German, however, you must compare English and German words that come from Proto-Germanic. English words that come from French are noise in this comparison.
In addition, the fact that idioms are shared between English and French isn't particularly because English speakers borrowed the idioms from French. It's more because English and French are both European languages whose speakers have a long history of cultural exchange, a history that actually goes further back than the languages themselves. There are a lot of idioms that are common to both languages because they both got them from a third source. The big common sources are the Greco-Roman classics, the Bible, Christianity. Also, every major work of prose from most West European countries since the Renaissance has been translated to the languages of the others and read extensively, so that yes, "I think, therefore I am" is as much of a stock phrase as "être ou ne pas être, telle est la question" is one in French.
But translation isn't easy for humans, so there's no reason to expect it should be easy for computers.
Translating from one language to another, for a human translator, basically comes down to this:
But the problem is that there is never unique "equivalent" text in the target language, but rather, a lot of alternatives that make different tradeoffs. This is because a foreign language is part of a foreign culture that has many concepts that are foreign to the source language, and likewise, the source language is part of a source culture that is foreign to the target language. So translators repeatedly find themselves in situations where either they must leave out something that the source text says or implies, or else say something unnatural in the target language to convey that information.
Comparing the grammar of dramatically different languages makes this really clear. For example, many languages have grammatical evidentiality, where statements are subject to grammatical rules that depend on the source of the speaker's information for the statement. So for example, a language where the equivalent to the sentence "Joe kicked Tom" required the verb to be conjugated differently depending on whether the speaker saw Joe kick Tom or heard so. If you had to translate an English text to a language like that, you'd have to decide, for each clause in the English text, who is the speaker of the sentence, and whether they know the event first-hand or second-hand, and either of those may often be unclear from the English text.
In the converse case, imagine if we're translating from a language like that into English. Then every sentence in the source language encodes some claim about how the speaker knows the information conveyed in that sentence. A completely literal translation, in which every English sentence had that information, would be extremely unnatural English writing. Leaving it out of every single sentence, on the other hand, might leave out something important to understand the text in some cases. So the translator has to decide in which cases the evidential conjugations of the source language must be translated into a longer English sentence than otherwise necessary.
This is one extreme example, but this sort of problem occurs at every level in translation. Translators often find themselves adding in information that the source text doesn't say, having to use circumlocutions in the target language to express really simple things from the source language, leaving out information from the source text has because it would be too cumbersome to phrase it in the target language, adopting strange conventions in the target language, or having to write supplementary materials to help the readers understand the translation (footnotes, introductions).
Or in a few cases, the translators write for people who don't know the source language but are familiar with some of the customs and concepts, or willing to learn them to understand the translation, and then they just leave untranslated words in. (Examples: lots of philosophy translations from German or French; anime fansubs that leave Japanese honorifics like -san or -sempai in, because the people who use them are anime fans, are at least a bit familiar with them, and actually understand more nuances that way.)
So, translation is not a mechanical task, and thus, there can't be a simple set of rules to do it. It's, as I said at the top, understanding a text in the source language, and writing another in the target language, tailored toward a different audience. And it requires understanding the audiences of the original text and the translation, and making many informal decisions based on that.
By donating $1 to a charity that agrees to use it the way you would like to use it yourself, you have basically spent that dollar on what you want, tax-free. This is the power of the tax deduction for charitable donations--you get to divert money that would otherwise have gone to the government into your favorite charity, which can then spend it tax-free.
If you're rich enough, you can create your own charity organization and have it advance your own agenda. The problem is that your agenda may not be good...
The excellent link in hardburn's post above has a great answer to this whole "correlation is not causation" response that people like you always trot out when confronted with a study with conclusions you don't like:
Yes, as I highlighted, there are whole scientific fields whose data is based on nothing but correlations.
If that is true, then the theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun must be bad science, because this is exactly how modern heliocentrism got started. Galileo's heliocentric model had no predictive advantage over the geocentric models of his day. It took about 100 years for evidence that supported Galileo over his adversaries to appear.
At any rate, the idea that "good science starts with a clean slate" just doesn't survive when confronted with the history of science. Take, for example, Thomas Kuhn's famous notion of normal science from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Normal science is a period in the history of a science where there exists a paradigm. It is fair to say that during normal science, what scientists do is to take the existing paradigm and try to show, over and over again, that the paradigm explains everything. In your terms, they start with the outcome (e.g., planets orbit around the Sun) and try justify it with observations.
So basically, the most important book about the history of science in the second half of the 20th century contradicts your claims about "good" vs. "bad" science.